Open whatever word processing package you have and THEN try to open the file from within your program.
Change the file extension from .doc to .rtf. rtf stands for rich text format and is supposedly meant to be a format that will work with any word processing package.
Change the file extension to .txt. .txt means a basic text file - you will definitely lose formatting with this one but if the above 2 fail, it could be worth a try still.